Care not health should be centre of more integrated system, former health ministers agree

A “fundamental reimagining” of health and social care is required to give the public a system that focuses primarily on care but is supported by health services, and not the other way round, past health ministers of all parties agreed at a meeting at the King’s Fund on Thursday 15 November.

The meeting was held to launch the King’s Fund’s “Time to think differently” programme, which aims to stimulate debate about the changes needed in health and social care to meet future demands.1

All political parties had acknowledged that care services needed to be revamped to ensure adequate service provision, quality, and affordability as the population ages and that social care needed to be more closely integrated with NHS services, speakers said. Although the NHS was designed around the delivery of transient episodes of healthcare to generally healthy people, most of the demand for health services now …